How Texting Is Wrecking Our Language By Anwar F. Accawi

The Effects of Technology on Social Life

As time goes on, the world is constantly going through changes. One main aspect of these changes is technology, and how it affects the social aspect of our lives. The passages “How Texting is Wrecking our Language'' by John Humphrys and “The Telephone” by Anwar F Accawi both specifically talk about new technology and what changes it has on our social lives and our language. Both of these stories are first person accounts on how new technology was introduced to their lives and what changes it had on the environment that they lived in. As technology has gotten more and more advanced, it continues to play a bigger role in impacting the social aspect of our lives.

The story “The Telephone” by Anwar F Accawi

Life in the village was very simple where the community was very tight-knit and everybody had a job to do. Accawi explained how the villagers were skeptical and fearful of the new technology at first, believing it to be some kind of foreign magic. However, they soon became captivated by the phone and the possibilities it offered for communication and connecting with the outside world. Accawi goes on to describe the ways in which the telephone changed the lives of the villagers. They were able to keep in touch with family members who had moved away from the village, conduct business more efficiently, and even find love through phone conversations. He also talked about the more negative aspects of the phone, such as the potential for eavesdropping and the loss of in person communication, mainly how it changed the village as a whole. In the story Accawi states, “And they were always looking up from their games and drinks and talk to glance at the phone in the corner, as if expecting it to ring any minute and bring news that would change their lives and deliver them from their aimless existence” (Paragraph 22). This shows what the arrival of the telephone really did to the village over time. Accawi writes about how the telephone

Humphrys is very passionate about this subject and uses very strong language to get his points across. The main argument in this reading is that texting is causing a decline in literacy and communication skills. He talks about how the abbreviated and often misspelled language used in text messages is leading to a culture of laziness and carelessness in language, which ultimately undermines the complexity and value of the English language. In the text he states, “It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped” (Paragraph 15-16). This shows the true distaste that Humphrys has for texting and what it has done to the English language, particularly losing punctuation and abbreviating words. Humphrys states that text messages are filled with abbreviations and acronyms that have no place in formal writing or speech. And he argues that these forms of language are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday communication, leading to a decline in the quality of our writing and speaking skills. He goes to the extreme explaining his distaste for texting and what its done to language,